1.28.2001
Climbing the ladder:
A new generation of Hispanics finds opportunity, success in R.I.

First in a monthly series on the changing face of Rhode Island as shown by results of the 2000 Census.


By ARIEL SABAR
Journal Staff Writer

Dr. Jose Polanco is in many ways the picture of a young American professional.

Journal photos / Mary Beth Meehan Dr. Jose Polanco

Learn more about Rhode Island's growing Latino middle class with a collection of links on the subject.

And like the Irish and Italians who preceded them here, they are now entering the middle class. They are sending their children to private schools and Little League, buying homes, and leaving the central cities for suburbs such as Cranston, Cumberland, Barrington, Lincoln, and Warwick Neck.

The trend is nothing new in places such as Miami, San Antonio and Los Angeles, which have a substantial Hispanic middle class and where Latinos have a history that in many cases predates European settlement.

But in Rhode Island, where the first significant wave of Hispanic immigrants arrived just 25 years ago, they have only in the last few years secured a toehold in prestigious occupations -- a development that Latinos hope will propel them in greater numbers into elected office and one that signals the opening of new frontiers of economic growth in the state.

"You're beginning to see the second generation of those early Hispanic migrating families who are now putting their children through college and through professional schools," says Roberto Gonzalez, who was the only Hispanic in his senior class at Central High School in 1969 and is now the state's first and still only Latino judge.

"We have a very interesting emerging professional community here in Rhode Island, which includes dentists, psychologists, school administrators, nurses, social workers," he says. "And you're beginning to see engineers and architects and computer programmers."

CHRISTOPHER L. BERGSTROM, the executive director of the state's strategy-setting Economic Policy Council, says that the growth in Latino professionals and entrepreneurs will be a force in rebuilding an economic base in older cities such as Providence, Pawtucket and Central Falls.

But Bergstrom sees wider ramifications for the statewide economy, as well. Latinos and other immigrants are walking in the footsteps of generations of European immigrants, whose small companies eventually grew into major employers and engines of the state's economy.

"It's in our DNA as a state for this kind of stuff to happen," Bergstrom said.

Even so, widespread prosperity for Latinos here is still years, possibly decades, away. Immigrants continue to arrive in Rhode Island from poor countries with low literacy rates and little economic opportunity.

As a group, a Census Bureau report last year showed, Hispanics nationwide are far less likely than non-Hispanic whites to have at least a high school education. They are more likely to be unemployed or work in unskilled jobs, more likely to live in single-parent families, and three times more likely to live below the poverty line.

Nearing midnight on Thanksgiving night, Dr. Jose Polanco studies for the medical boards during a moonlight shift at the Rehabilitation Hospital of Rhode Island. Faced with loans from medical school and a new mortgage, Polanco moonlights when he can at area hospitals.

Indeed, many second-generation Hispanics continue to work in the economy's lower echelons. Three of Polanco's siblings, for instance, work in low-wage factory jobs, a fourth works as a hotel maid, and a fifth as a cashier in a check-cashing store.

But it is clear from a wide range of interviews and government reports that Latinos are slowly making headway into the middle and upper-middle classes in Rhode Island.

According to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of Rhode Island Latinos in executive, managerial and professional jobs doubled from the years 1990-1991 to 1997-1998, from about 1,300 to more than 2,600. The proportion of employed Latinos in those job categories rose over that period from about 7 percent to 11 percent.

"When I came here 15 years ago, I was among a handful of [Latino] doctors," said Dr. Pablo Rodriguez, an obstetrician-gynecologist who cofounded the Rhode Island Latino Political Action Committee three years ago. "I hosted a dinner six months ago and 25 came, and that's just those that showed up."

Meanwhile, the number of Hispanic-owned businesses in Rhode Island more than tripled from 1987 to 1992, to 1,300. That pace was faster than every state but Maine and North Carolina. The Census Bureau has yet to release more recent figures, but Jaime L. Aguayo, an official with the U.S. Small Business Administration in Providence who works closely with Latino businesses, estimates the number now is about 2,500.

The trend is also playing out on college campuses.

According to the Board of Governors for Higher Education, the number of Latino students at the state's public colleges has nearly tripled in recent years, from 633 in 1988 to nearly 1,800, or 5 percent of all students, in 1999. Over the last five years, Latinos have surpassed blacks as the largest minority group at the Community College of Rhode Island and Rhode Island College, which draw most of their students from within the state.

And increasingly, parents are sending their children to private prep schools that have long been white enclaves.

Marta V. Martinez, the Mexican-born chairwoman of the Governor's Advisory Commission on Hispanic Affairs, had for years gotten requests from the Providence public schools for classroom presentations on the history of Latinos in Rhode Island. But last year, for the first time, she received such requests from Hispanic parents at private prep schools such as Moses Brown and the Lincoln School.

Dr. Jose Polanco clears his new back yard of leaves. He and his wife, Sharli, recently bought their first home in the Edgewood section of Cranston.

"This isn't teachers calling and saying, 'Can you bring someone to expose our kids to Hispanic culture,' " she recalled the other day. "This is parents calling, saying, 'What can we do as parents to bring our culture to our school?' I was floored."

These trends come over a decade in which the Hispanic population grew 65 percent, to an estimated 76,000 last year, even as the state's non-Hispanic white population has shrunk.

ONE IMPORTANT MEASURE of Latinos' growing economic muscle was the formation in September of the Hispanic American Chamber of Commerce. Its inaugural dinner in November at The Westin Providence attracted more than 200 people, as well as corporate sponsorships from major businesses such as Fleet Bank, Narragansett Electric, The Providence Journal and First Bank & Trust Co.

U.S. Sen. Jack Reed addressed the group, in Spanish.

"For an organization that had been in business for two months, the turnout was outstanding," said P. Raymond Guzman, a Mexican-American business consultant who lives in Barrington and is the chamber's executive director. "I promise you than when we have our reception a year from now, we'll have double or triple that number."

Guzman, whose parents came to the United States to work as ranch hands in Nebraska, moved to Rhode Island in 1979 and got into the mechanical contracting business.

Back then, he remembers Providence's Broad Street as a seedy strip of decrepit buildings and drug addicts. Now, the street is the state's largest Hispanic business district. The focus of revitalization efforts, it teems with grocery stores, beauty salons, automotive repair shops, cell-phone stores and a growing number of accountants, tax preparers and insurance agents.

The chamber plans to cater to them by offering business training classes in Spanish, lobbying state lawmakers, advocating for Latino businesses before lending institutions, and teaching conversational English.

"There is a lot of money to be made by working with Hispanic business people," said Guzman, a bearish man whose basement office in Providence's West End is decorated with a picture of him at a charity golf tournament at the Richmond Country Club.

"Just by being a group," he says of the chamber, "we can go to the corporate mainstream in America and say, 'Hey, here we are.' "

The state's business establishment has already begun to take notice. Although other Hispanic chambers have started and failed over the past two decades, this is the first to affiliate with the state's largest business group -- the Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce. Members of the Hispanic chamber automatically become members of the Greater Providence group, which is extending its business-to-business referral network and other services to the Latino businesses.

James G. Hagan, president of the Greater Providence chamber, said that his group's 3,400 members saw a relationship with the Hispanic chamber as mutually profitable.

"This is not a social service; this is self-serving for both sides," he said in an interview."We believe they create business. They've got to do banking, they're going to buy stocks and bonds, they're going to buy automobiles, and they will buy all sorts of goods and services. The quicker we get them to that level, the better we're all going to be."

Some big business are already moving to capitalize on the dollars flowing from Latino neighborhoods. Super Stop & Shop, Big K Mart and Lowe's Home Improvement Warehouse are planning to open stores in proposed shopping centers near Broad Street that are expected to more than double the retail square footage in the largely Hispanic neighborhood.

A market analysis commissioned by the nonprofit group Southside/Broad Street found that Broad Street still lacked enough grocery, clothing and general merchandise stores to capture the roughly $208 million per year that residents spend on those items.

State agencies and nonprofit groups have also recognized the economic turbines starting to whir in Latino neighborhoods and have sought to fuel them with mentoring and training programs, inner-city business incubators and tax incentives. The state's Economic Development Corporation entered the picture this summer by forming a division devoted to economic growth in the state's older cities.

Some among the new generation of Latinos are starting companies to bridge the chasm between mainstream businesses and Latino consumers.

Dr. Jose Polanco and his wife, Sharli, right, help his niece's daughter, Shannelys Peña play "pin the tail on the dinosaur" at their son Pedro's third birthday party. Sharli, born in the United States, learned Spanish and speaks it in the home, so that their son will grow up being able to communicate with Jose's side of the family.

Delia C. Rodriguez, who is Argentinian, started an ad agency in Providence in June that specializes in marketing to the state's Latinos. Within a few months, she had signed contracts with WJAR-TV, Bank Rhode Island, FleetBoston Financial Corp., Neighborhood Health Plan, and the state Department of Health.

A talk-show host on Spanish-language radio and a former U.S. Census Bureau liaison to Hispanic neighborhoods, Rodriguez says that her new business would have been unthinkable even 10 years ago.

"The Latino community in Rhode Island is a very new community," she said. "You'll see some people who lived here maybe 25 years ago, but the large numbers you have now -- to the point where there are bodegas, restaurants, places to send money back home -- started to grow mainly in the last decade."

"You see the buying power of people," she added. "But there isn't a well-developed strategy by big business in how to reach them."

THE STATE'S FIRST Latino judge, Roberto Gonzalez, exemplifies the growth of the Latino middle class in Rhode Island. The son of Puerto Rican parents, he was the only Hispanic in his senior class at Central High School and one of just two in the 1969 freshman class at the University of Rhode Island. (The other was a Puerto Rican basketball recruit from New York City.)

When he started practicing law in Rhode Island in 1986, Gonzalez says competition was scarce: there were just two other Latino lawyers and no shortage of prejudice. "I remember going into court and people asking me, 'Well, where's your attorney?' "

In 1994, Gonzalez was sworn in as a judge on the Providence Housing Court, becoming the first and still only Latino jurist in the state's history.

Whereas earlier waves of professionals left the state for places with larger Latino populations such as New York City, Chicago and Miami, he says, many in the new generation are staying to serve the growing population here and remain near friends and family.

"As the population grows and emerges as an economic power, this becomes now an attractive alternative to some of the big cities without the big city headaches," said Gonzalez, who is 49.

The "Directorio Hispano," a privately published Hispanic Yellow Pages, offers a glimpse at the growth of the state's Spanish-speaking lawyers and doctors. In the 1990-1991 edition, the lawyer listings took up five pages. In the 2000 edition, they filled 33 pages, many of them with full-page ads. The pages of doctor's listings, meanwhile, have grown from 2 to 18.

Another center of growth is education. In 1990, the Providence School Department employed 23 Hispanic teachers and one assistant principal. This year, it employs about six times that number of teachers, plus 4 assistant prinicipals and 5 principals.

But prominent Latinos still talk about the difficulties of keeping some of the best and brightest in Rhode Island. And some say they are disappointed that the growth in the number of professionals here hasn't been greater.

The increase in Hispanic school teachers in Providence, for instance, hasn't matched the growth in the Hispanic student population. Desperation has reached such levels that school officials have begun to call teacher colleges in Latin America and place help-wanted ads in Puerto Rican newspapers.

Gonzalez, the judge, can tick off a list of hardships that he says impede a wider ascent into the middle class: lagging high school graduation rates, unemployment, language and cultural barriers, troubled city schools, and alcoholism, drug abuse and other social ills associated with poverty.

"By the time you get filtered through these social issues, you have a very small number of people who are in a position to go on to college, and a smaller number who are able to go on to profesional school," he said. "It's very difficult for someone to take on what is now a mortgage-size commitment for educational loans.

"Until we have what I think is a couple of generations of growth and development," he continued, "I don't think we'll be at the same level as the rest of our community to put their kids through colleges and professional schools."

NONETHELESS , prominent Latinos see the growing, if still small, Hispanic middle class as a precursor to political power. "When you have a community viewed as an asset instead of a liability, you immediately acquire political power," said Pablo Rodriguez, the doctor who founded the Rhode Island Latino Political Action Committee.

The movement into politics so far has been slow, but there are many signs of greater political engagement. A computer analysis by The Journal showed that turnout in Latino neighborhoods during the September primary elections was more than double the statewide average.

Angel Taveras, a lawyer who is the son of Dominican immigrants, made his rise from the federal Head Start program to Harvard University the motto of his campaign for Congress last year. He came in third place in the 2nd Congressional District race, but made an unexpectedly strong showing in Providence, where he captured one out of every three votes.

The state legislature in November gained its second Latino, Leon F. Tejada, a Dominican computer-systems analyst. During his campaign, Tejada said that the predominantly Hispanic House District 18 needed someone who spoke residents' language.

While some predict that Providence could have a Latino mayor within the next decade, others see a longer road. "We're still not in positions of power," said Delia Rodriguez, the ad agency president and former Census Bureau official. "I wonder whether the election of the new state representative will give us more clout or not."

THE MOVEMENT into the economic mainstream hasn't always been easy for the second generation.

Polanco, the young doctor, says that he didn't hear the word SAT -- the acronym for the college admissions test -- until his last years in high school. "I had no preparation from the beginning that there's this thing called college and this is how you get there," he recalled recently. "There were no role models."

His mother and father had worked in the Dominican Republic as farmers. But their pay was too scant to provide for eight children. So they left for the United States when Polanco, their youngest, was 7.

They spoke no English and fell into work that didn't demand any. They scraped by on minimum-wage jobs assembling jewelry and mopping floors.

Polanco worked alongside his father one summer. The drudgery, in a box-making plant whose stifling heat he can still remember, convinced him that the path to a better life lay in his schoolwork at Providence's Central High.

He went to class every day, even as schoolmates succumbed to the siren songs of drugs and crime.

On graduation day, he addressed his class as valedictorian. Yet despite his academic achievements he says that just a couple of his teachers had encouraged him to go to college.

His first semesters at Brown University were a struggle, both academically and socially. "These people were from all over the world," he jokes now of Brown's cosmopolitan student body, "and I didn't even know where the East Side of Providence was."

But he learned. And when he graduated from medical school at State University of New York, more than 100 people, many of them family from the Dominican Republic, turned out for a party on Broad Street with cake, a DJ, speeches and dancing that lasted into the early morning.

Polanco is now in the third and final year of his medical residency. He is also moonlighting twice a month as a night-shift doctor at Landmark Medical Center in Woonsocket. He needs the extra income to pay the mortgage on his new house and the lease on the family's Honda Accord. He still sends money back to the Dominican Republic, including a check last November to help pay a sick aunt's hospital bills.

Even as he enters the American middle class -- he and his friends run a stock investment club over e-mail -- Polanco clasps tightly to his culture and his Dominican family.

He speaks Spanish around the house so that his 3-year-old son, Pedro, learns it as his first language. And he and his wife, Sharli, take Pedro each year to the Dominican Republic to visit Pedro's grandparents, who moved back when Polanco was in college.

The other night, Polanco tucked Pedro into bed and read him The Three Little Pigs and books on counting and "choo-choo" trains. They are all in English, but Polanco translated one into Spanish as he read aloud to his son.

"We are teaching our son Spanish," said Sharli Polanco, who traces her family history to Europe. "It's part of who he is. He's half Dominican, and he needs to be able to communiciate with his family and know that he's Dominican."

Jose Polanco knows that Pedro's life will be easier than his grandparents', and even his own. Polanco's father-in-law started an Educational IRA for Pedro before he was born. And Jose and Sharli now nourish it with $25 a month.

Though Pedro is still a couple of years shy of kindergarten, his parents have already set up a small Fisher Price desk for him in the kitchen, even if his studies at this point consist mostly of crayon drawings.

"He won't see me struggling as much as I saw my dad struggling," Polanco says. "By seeing someone in a professional career, it makes him think, 'I can do anything I want to.' I think it makes him dream more."

Polanco has spent the last few months looking for work after his medical residency. Last Tuesday, he accepted a position at Notre Dame Ambulatory Care Center, a health clinic on Broad Street, in Central Falls. Most of his patients will be Latino, many of them recent immigrants from Central America. He starts in August.

So after Brown University and medical school and the new house in Edgewood, he is returning to a neighborhood like the one where he grew up, to help people like his parents pursue their own dreams of a better life.

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